Album reviews with Michal Boncza: Of The Sun by Trupa Trupa

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Trupa TrupaOf The Sun(Glitterbeat Records)

TRUPA Trupa (“a corpse’s troupe”) hail from Gdansk in Poland, historically part of the powerful Hanseatic League and birthplace of that philosopher of pessimism Arthur Schopenhauer, iconic actor Klaus Kinsky and the calamitous Solidarnosc.

With an appropriate nod to Schopenhauer, frontman and poet Grzegorz Kwiatkowski has recently described Trupa Trupa’s music — somewhat inspired by Werner Hertzog’s film Fitzcarraldo and Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote — as a “meditative, pessimistic thing.”

Firm friends, the band are wedded to collective and democratic decision-making, reflected in their sophisticated and exploratory rock arrangements, delivered with superb musicianship.Overlapping voices, beautiful guitar cadences and a spellbinding syncopation of bass guitar and drums captivate with their thoughtful innovation.

From the dreamy Angle to the magnificently pulsating Long Time Ago, their lyrical mantras, studiously minimalistic, are deliberately left inconclusive or ambivalent.